Book News Roundup: Authors have their say on the US election

The main news item this week, across the board, is undoubtedly the countdown to the result of the US election. Will it be Clinton of Trump? Most people have an opinion either way, and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is no exception. The Americanah and ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ author has published an essay for The Atlantic titled ‘What Hillary Clinton’s Fans Love About Her’. Not only this, but George R. R. Martin also joined the campaign trail in its final days to express support for Clinton by encouraging early voters in New Mexico.

Something else worth your time (if you enjoy reading insults about Trump) is this list of 22 authors on Trump, from J. K. Rowling to Roxane Gay and Jeffrey Eugenides.

In other book news:

Many authors in the UK have joined forces to confront the government on its funding cuts to library and other cultural services. Thousands of campaigners participated in a protest march in London on Saturday 5 November, to criticise the closures (340 libraries in total have closed across the country since 2010).

‘Brexit’ has been named Word of the Year, and the most important political term for forty years, by Collins dictionary lexicographers. It beat out another close favourite, ‘Trumpism’, to the top spot, and has been selected for its general importance as well as mutability (‘Bakexit’, ‘Bremorse’, to name a few variations).

The Girl in the Spider’s Web movie adaptation, the sequel to David Fincher’s release of five years ago, now has a director: Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe). There’s no news yet on if the same cast will return.

Filming for On Chesil Beach, the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, is now underway, with Saiorsie Ronan in a lead role.

A new book of fairy tales, released this week, will turn all the tales you think you know on their head. Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned is a collection of 36 nineteenth-century fairy tales with a twist, and many of which have previously never been published in English. The authors include French literary giants of the decadent and early modernist movements, such as Charles Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Claude Cahun, and the tales are precursors to the postmodern stories concocted in the twentieth-century by the likes of Angela Carter.